Cognition and religion

Sociology of Religion, Winter, 2007 by Robert Wuthnow

Consider the following: A social scientist conducts a survey of college students to see whether or not they pray and, if so, what they pray about. He finds that students usually pray for something mental, such as asking God to help them remember a formula for a test; something emotional, such as coping with stress; or something else relatively intangible, such as "being with" them. They hardly ever pray for anything physical, such as asking God to heal an illness or fix a car.

These results pose an interesting puzzle. Assuming the survey was conducted properly and the responses are credible, how would one go about making sense of these findings? Were one to enlist a panel of social scientists to answer this question, at least three ideas would probably emerge. First, one could look at the students' needs. For instance, one might hypothesize that students pray this way because they are having more trouble with tests and stress than they are with health and cars. Alternatively, it might be that students pray this way because their friends do and they feel a need to belong. Asking questions about students' needs and relationships in the survey would be a good way of testing these hypotheses. Second, one might look at the context. The idea that America is afflicted with a "therapeutic culture" would be a likely starting point. This idea could be tested by asking students questions about their exposure to therapeutic ideas in psychology classes. Or it might be examined through qualitative information about cues in the society at large, such as from talk shows on radio and television. Third, one might try to situate the results in history. Secularization theory would be a good candidate for doing this. One might argue, for example, that Elijah asked God to burn the altar at Mount Carmel and Cotton Mather asked God to spare people from smallpox; in comparison, the students' vague psychological prayers might be considered a poor cousin of such piety. Each of these approaches could be interesting, and yet my reason for mentioning them is to suggest that they leave out something important. What might that be?

As sociological studies of religion have proliferated, an unfortunate consequence of this growth has been an increasing sense of insularity both within sociology itself and in relation to other disciplines. In the past, innovative scholarship occurred through extensive cross-disciplinary borrowing. During the 1960s, for instance, sociology of religion incorporated ideas from other fields that greatly enhanced its understanding of the cultural dimensions of religion. One thinks especially of Peter Berger's (1967) arguments about world views and plausibility structures that drew from the phenomenological theorizing of Alfred Schutz and Arnold Gehlen; of Robert Bellah's (1970, 1975) work on civil religion, informed by Rousseau's political theory and Tillich's theology; and of the more general impact of Clifford Geertz' (1973) writing about religion as a cultural system, Mary Douglas's (1966, 1970) discussions of purity and danger, and Victor Turner's (1969) treatments of ritual and liminality. Much of that work continues to be of interest and is frequently the topic of critical inquiries as well as appreciative applications (Asad 1993; Ortner 1997; Schilbrack 2005). However, it is also fair to say that questions about meaning, symbolism, ritual, identity, and experience remain sufficiently vague that scholars are sometimes tempted to throw up their hands and focus only on readily quantified topics, such as church membership rates and attendance at religious services. Geertz' interpretive approach has been criticized especially for its apparent lack of rigor (D'Andrade 1995), while Berger's emphasis on subjectivity has prompted similar concerns (Wuthnow 1987).

In the past few years religion has become a topic of increasing interest to scholars in other fields. Much of this work has been influenced by studies of human cognition. At present, there is relatively little evidence that insights from this work are being taken seriously within the sociology of religion (although see Klassen 2005; and on Durkheim, Bergesen 2004; Hammond 2003). Yet, as I will seek to demonstrate, these new lines of investigation offer ways of advancing our understanding of the cultural dimensions of religion. The point is not that sociologists should become camp followers of other disciplines. It is rather that selective incorporation and recasting of new ideas can contribute significantly to scholarship within sociology of religion itself.

Mention of neuroscience and cognitive psychology conjures up images of the most controversial--and therefore highly publicized--studies of religion. These studies include books and articles claiming to have identified a "God spot" in the brain, a spirituality gene, or a neural mechanism coded to seek transcendence (Ashbrook and Albright 1997; Persinger 1983; Schermer 2000; Hamer 2004). Interesting as these claims may be, many of them are only remotely relevant to empirical work in the social sciences. Some are inspired by the same pretensions that led earlier scholars--such as Freud (1927) and Frazer (1922)--to believe that they had found the key to explaining the origins of religion (Atran 2002; Boyer 2001; Masuzawa 1993). Other claims are largely theological, viewing evidence about cognitive functioning as proof of a divine presence (Peterson 1999) or of a natural human inclination for such presence (Barrett 2004). Furthermore, these studies typically emphasize biology to the point that social scientists find them reductionistic.